The Copernicus of Antiquity: Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath

Very brief and awfully arcane

In his popular book and television series of 1980, Cosmos, astronomer and author Carl Sagan includes a chapter/episode on Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek scientist. In the 3rd century BC, Aristarchus conceived the heliocentric model of our solar system, meaning the Earth and other planets revolve around the sun. We know this because Archimedes informs us of Aristarchus’s accomplishment in one of his scientific publications written about a century later. Aristarchus was not able to convince many of his contemporaries, however, and, like much of ancient Greek scholarship, his work was forgotten for centuries, only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus established and mathematically proved the heliocentric model in his publication On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, and the rest, as they say, is history. In Sagan’s summary of Aristarchus’s career, his heliocentric theory was only one of the ancient Greek’s precocious discoveries. In many ways he was a scientist way ahead of his time.

A desire to learn more about this interesting character led me to The Copernicus of Antiquity, published in 1920, a brief biography of Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath. This book is only about 60 pages long, and the biography is further shortened by the fact that only the second half of the book is actually about Aristarchus. The first half of the book is a brief recap of earlier Greek astronomers and their discoveries, including such ancient cosmographers as Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and roughly a dozen others.

The Copernicus of Antiquity was published in a series of books entitled Pioneers of Progress: Men of Science, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London. It was likely adapted from an earlier, more extensive book by Heath from 1913. I would assume the Men of Science series was intended for a general non-academic reading audience, but this book certainly isn’t written that way. A great deal of prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader. Heath writes as if he expects his audience to have read much ancient scientific literature in the original Greek. He also expects the reader to have memorized all of the mathematical operations in The Elements, Euclid’s classic book on geometry. Granted, many college students of 1920 would have studied Greek, but most were neither professional classicists nor mathematicians. While it’s a well-known fact these days that the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, few, if asked, could conjure up the angle at which the Sun subtends the zodiac circle, but Heath writes as if this and many similar astronomical measurements were common knowledge. The book is full of complex mathematical computations that will be over the head of curious casual readers.

Of course, the fault is probably not with Heath but rather with whoever edited the Pioneers of Progress series. They took a full-length scholarly monograph intended for classical philologists and mathematicians and condensed it down to a pamphlet size, but they didn’t adjust the content for a pamphlet audience. I learned much more about Aristarchus from Sagan’s chapter in Cosmos than I did from this book by Heath. With the exception of a few facts here and there, I found it a waste of time. If an overview of ancient Greek astronomy is what you’re looking for, undoubtedly better texts exist than this.

The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson

A quarter millennium of rich intellectual history reassessed

British historian, novelist, and journalist Peter Watson has published over two dozen books over the past 50 years. He is best known for his nonfiction books on intellectual history or the history of ideas. Rather than tell the history of the world through its wars, dynasties, and diplomacy, Watson examines world history through the arts, sciences, literature, and social sciences. In his 2010 book The German Genius, Watson explores the prodigious intellectual achievements of Germanic Europe, a realm that includes not just Germany but other German-speaking lands, including Prussia, Austria, and parts of Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and more. The book covers a time span from 1750 to the present. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Germany (collectively speaking) led the world in a vast assortment of scholarly disciplines: philosophy, physics, biology, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, literature, history, sociology, psychology, and music to name a few. Germany’s intellectual profile took the ultimate turn for the worst in the 20th century, however, with the Nazi atrocities of World War II and the persecution of academics under that authoritarian regime. Watson examines how this nation stacked with geniuses fell from the zenith to the nadir of intellectualism, and how that fall has affected Germany’s intellectual legacy.

I had previously read Watson’s 2022 book The French Mind, in which he gives a similarly comprehensive, centuries-spanning overview of French thought and culture. I would assume his latest book, The British Imagination, does the same for the UK, but I haven’t yet read it. The German Genius is a better book than The French Mind, which tried too hard to advance a specific thesis and was only partially successful. The German Genius mostly just lets the Germans’ achievements speak for themselves. While The French Mind pushed a very feminist argument, feminists will not be happy at all with The German Genius, where maybe five women are mentioned for every thousand males. In both his French and German studies, Watson makes the convincing case that Britain and the United States could learn a thing or two from the way these cultures view the world.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the Third Reich. Watson doesn’t excuse or deny in any way the evils perpetrated by the Nazis or the horrors of the Holocaust. He calls out many scholars and intellectuals who supported the Nazis. The question Watson grapples with in this book is to what extent should the Nazis’ wrongs negate German achievements before and after the Third Reich. He traces a continuum of intellectual cause and effect from Immanuel Kant to the present day. Romanticism led to inwardness, which led to cultural pessimism. Social Darwinism led to nationalism and antiSemitism. The horrors of the Nazi years are a part of this continuum, not removed from it, but how much of this spectrum of thought should be darkened by that black mark, and where exactly is the line of demarcation? Friedrich Nietzsche’s work had philosophical value, for example, but was co-opted and misconstrued by the Nazis, thus tainting his name. Martin Heidigger, on the other hand, was a willing collaborator with the Nazis. Does that render his philosophy totally invalid?

Watson asserts that, because of animosity generated by the World Wars, many Germans who made important contributions to knowledge and society have undeservedly fallen into obscurity. He even includes an appendix on 35 semi-forgotten Germans we should all know better. Watson also points out the important contributions to American and British science, arts, and culture made by German immigrants who fled the Nazi regime.

Watson is really great at writing these sweeping historical syntheses. He summarizes vast quantities of information and explains complex concepts in engaging and accessible prose, all the while pointing out interesting connections and drawing insightful conclusions. I come away from each of his books with a long list of interesting people, ideas, and books to explore further. I enjoy Watson’s books so much, I purposefully read them slowly too make them last longer. I would suggest starting with his worldwide histories Ideas and The Modern Mind before venturing into his regional studies like The German Genius and The French Mind.

Logic Machines and Diagrams by Martin Gardner

Early graphic representations of mathematical reasoning

For almost a quarter of a century, Martin Gardner (1914–2010) wrote a column in Scientific American magazine entitled Mathematical Games, in which he would present all sorts of math curiosities, puzzles, and brain teasers. These columns were assembled into many collected volumes that were popular with general math-curious readers. He also wrote plenty of books outside of that series on topics concerning math, science, and magic (card tricks and other forms of prestidigitation). Logic Machines and Diagrams, published in 1958, is one of Gardner’s earlier works, written when he had just started with Scientific American. In regards to its particular subject, the book has a sort of master’s-thesis feel to it, but it is still written very accessibly for curious non-mathematicians.

A logic diagram is a graph or chart that helps illustrate or prove the veracity and validity of a series of logical propositions. The most obvious and commonly known example of a logic diagram is the Venn diagram composed of interlocking circles, introduced by English mathematician John Venn in the 1880s. Gardner covers these as well as more complicated forms of logic diagrams. If one takes such diagrams and converts them into a three-dimensional analog—with levers and gears, for instance—then you have a logic machine. The structure of logical propositions can also be translated into electronic circuitry, thus creating an electric logic machine. From there, one naturally progresses to digital logic machines like the precursors to today’s computers. (In 1958 personal computers as we know them today did not exist, but there were giant industrial and military computers like ENIAC.) To solve problems and learn, the “AI” systems that we use today employ the same laws of logic that were explicated by Aristotle, George Boole, and others, just as human brains constantly use these same logical laws without consciously thinking about them.

Perhaps because I’m a graphic designer, the diagrams interested me far more than the machines. I found the first few chapters of this book really fascinating. First, Gardner introduces us to Ramón Lull (or Llull), a 13th century Spanish philosopher who devised a series of complicated diagrams with moving parts in the form of rotating paper wheels. These weren’t so useful for logic, as Gardner points out, but rather they amounted to a sort of Western European I Ching used to inspire philosophical contemplation and intellectual creativity. In Chapter 2, Gardner discusses Venn and other logical diagrammists like him, including the author/mathematician Lewis Carroll of Alice in Wonderland fame. In Chapter 3, Gardner presents his own system of logical diagrams designed to move beyond the computational capabilities of Venn diagrams.

At about the halfway point of the book, Gardner turns his attention to logic machines—mechanical, electronic, and digital. He ends up admitting, however, that none of these machines were as effective as a decent diagramming system, and they amounted to little more than experimental novelties perhaps useful as classroom learning tools. In his final chapter, Gardner speculates about the future of logic machines. Much of what he predicts about computing are things that we now take for granted every day with our desktop computers, tablets, smart phones, and other electronic devices.

For over half a century, Gardner was mathematics’ most charming and prolific ambassador to the general public. The subject matter of Logic Machines and Diagrams isn’t as deliberately fun as Gardner’s Mathematical Games columns, but it will still appeal to the same audience—anyone interested in mathematical “mental floss.”

My Life with the Eskimo by Vilhjálmur Stéfansson

Traveling to hunt, hunting to travel

Vilhjálmur Stéfansson (1879–1962) was a Canadian-American explorer and ethnographer. He was born in Manitoba, the son of Icelandic immigrants. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to the Dakota Territory of the United States. He was educated at the universities of North Dakota, Iowa, and Harvard. As an explorer, his area of interest was the Arctic, and as an ethnographer, his expertise was the Inuit or Eskimo (the former is the more proper term, but the latter was more widely used in Stefansson’s lifetime). From 1908 to 1912, Stéfansson lived among the Eskimo on the north coast of Alaska and Canada, studying their ways and collecting artifacts and data for the American Museum of Natural History, which afterwards published his scientific findings. In 1912, Stéfansson also published a popular account of his expedition, intended for general readers, entitled My Life with the Eskimo. At that time, Stéfansson’s more than three year sojourn in the frozen North was the longest Arctic expedition on record.

But did he use all that time wisely? If this book were all you had to go on, it wouldn’t seem so. Stéfansson’s stated aim was to travel eastward to find bands of Inuit who have previously had little or no contact with White people. He bounces around the Alaskan coast for two years, however, and 162 pages of the book go by before he even gets started towards that goal. Even then, the book makes it unclear what exactly he’s trying to accomplish. The bulk of the text is about hunting caribou and seals. Stéfansson needs to hunt to feed himself, his assistants, and his sled dog team. He travels hundreds of miles to shoot the food necessary to travel hundreds of more miles to shoot more food to travel hundreds of more miles, and so on. Almost every animal they see, they kill, either for the meat, the skin, or as a specimen for the AMNH. Also a member of the expedition is a zoologist named Dr. Anderson, but he and Stéfansson are never in the same place, and the two are constantly traveling hundreds of miles to look for one another.

While all this is going on, Stéfansson is conducting scientific research, but he doesn’t tell you much about it. He’ll say, “I collected folklore from the people in this village.” That’s great. Would you like to tell us a little about that? No, let’s get back to another hunting story. Not until after page 360 does he finally discuss some of the archaeological digs, ethnological research, and linguistic studies that he conducted. These topics, much more interesting than all the caribou hunting, are relegated to the last few chapters of the book, treated as if they were appendices. If the entire book were more like these last 70 pages, My Life with the Eskimo would have been a much more satisfying read.

Reminiscent of another popular expedition narrative, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki (1948), Stéfansson also has an ethnological thesis to argue in My Life with the Eskimo. In his travels, he encounters what he calls “Blonde Eskimo”—Inuit with light hair, light skin, and blue eyes. Stéfansson theorizes that these may be the descendants of Danish and/or Norwegian settlers who disappeared from the west coast of Greenland centuries ago and perhaps drifted westward. Unlike Kon-Tiki, Stéfansson does not belabor the point. This theory is not the book’s raison d’etre, just one matter discussed among many. Though Stéfansson’s hypothesis of the Blonde Eskimo’s Norse origins does not seem so farfetched, as with Heyerdahl’s theory, 21st-century DNA testing has since disproved it.

I read quite a few explorer memoirs, and this one is just mediocre. Stéfansson is clearly very knowledgeable about the Inuit, but writing for the general public does not seem to have been his forte. Again, the last 70 pages of this book are quite good, but up to that point there’s a fair amount of boredom between nuggets of interest.

The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris

Liberal common sense, well-argued

American science writer Timothy Ferris published about a dozen books on astronomy before the 2010 release of his book The Science of Liberty, which is about a whole lot more than just astronomy. Ferris was a friend and colleague of Carl Sagan (the two worked together on that gold record that went out with the Voyager 1 space probe), and, judging by this book, he shares a lot of common ground with Sagan as a science educator/promoter and liberal activist. The message of The Science of Liberty could have come from Sagan’s pen, but I actually like Ferris’s journalistic style of writing better than Sagan’s more personal Henry-David-Thoreau-of-space musings. In The Science of Liberty, Ferris makes the case that—as simply put as possible—science is beneficial to liberty and vice versa. He argues that science furthers human happiness and freedom, thus advancing the cause of classical liberalism, and that science can only prosper in a liberal-democratic society that values civil liberties, academic freedom, and emancipation from dogma.

That may sound like common sense, but it’s surprising how many people and regimes in history have tried to argue the opposite, as Ferris recounts in this historical overview. In the opening chapters, Ferris outlines the framework of his political hypotheses. Then follows a series of investigations into chronologically presented periods in history—the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, World War II, the Cold War, etc.—in which Ferris examines how science and liberty were furthered or hindered. Periodically interspersed are a few statistics-heavy chapters in which Ferris compares the successes and failures of liberal-democratic nations versus other, less scientifically inclined societies.

Ferris introduces a simple but insightful new model of political ideology. Instead of the familiar spectrum analogy in which liberals fall to the left and conservatives to the right, Ferris proposes a triangular model in which liberals, conservatives, and progressives are the three equidistant corners. This book was published before Donald Trump entered politics, so Ferris doesn’t cover the most recent wave of anti-intellectualism from the conservative right, though he does hint at its foreshadowing with some brief mentions of George W. Bush. Surprisingly, Ferris spends fewer pages discussing conservative anti-science (e.g. fascists, Christian fundamentalists, Islamist terrorists) than he spends discussing progressive anti-science (e.g. communists, Marxists, ultra-woke academics, postmodern deconstructionists). Ferris, in my opinion, is too dismissive of socialism, implying that it always leads to totalitarianism. While Stalin and Mao were nightmares that certainly didn’t do science or liberty any favors, FDR’s New Deal or Scandinavia’s social service programs could be considered socialist science experiments that worked out for the good.

Prior to reading this book, I already agreed with just about every aspect of Ferris’s thesis, so I didn’t really need any convincing. Most of what he argues here just seems like common sense to my Jeffersonian side. While reading the first couple chapters, I found myself wondering, do I really want to read a whole book that’s persuading me to believe what I already believe? As I got further into the book, however, I really enjoyed it, and I learned quite a bit. The historical chapters present a lot of familiar characters and stories from science history, but Ferris fleshes them out with many interesting details that were new to me. I gleaned all sorts of fascinating biographical tidbits on scientists like Galileo, Newton, Locke, Jefferson, Darwin, Edison, and even anti-science figures like Hitler. Ferris also has a real knack for selecting memorable and relevant quotes, and the statistics he cites are well chosen and quite eye-opening. Though I primarily expected a book on science history, Ferris’s explication of political ideologies as they relate to science and liberty also prompted me to reexamine some of my own political preconceptions. 

The Science of Liberty is a very thought-provoking read. It really spoke to me, not only aligning with much of what I believe but also helping to clarify some of those beliefs. People who already believe in liberalism and the value of science will appreciate this book immensely, but will it convince anyone who needs convincing? Will conservatives want to read it? They should read it, but unfortunately, they probably won’t.

Aku-Aku by Thor Heyerdahl

Chasing secrets on Easter Island

Thor Heyerdahl was an explorer who achieved worldwide fame in the 1950s and ‘60s—not quite as famous as Jacques Cousteau, perhaps, but close. The Norwegian adventurer and experimental archaeologist is best-known for riding a raft across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to French Polynesia, a journey he recounted in his book and Oscar-winning documentary film, both entitled Kon-Tiki. His follow-up to this much-celebrated achievement was an expedition to Easter Island in 1955 and 1956, which is recounted in his book Aku-Aku, published in 1957.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is known for its giant stone heads carved out of lava rock. At the time of Heyerdahl’s trip, little was known about who made them, how they were made, and how the incredibly heavy rocks were transported to and erected at their various locations around the island. The thesis that Heyerdahl spent his life trying to prove is that Polynesian islanders are of American origin, essentially descendants of seafaring Inca or other Indigenous Peruvians. On Easter Island, he looked for evidence to support that theory and did find some correspondence between the artworks of Easter Island and those of the Inca. Heyerdahl was not an academic scientist, which opens him up to criticism by those with PhDs who regard him as merely an adventurer and pseudoscientst, so on this expedition he invited three professional archaeologists along on this expedition.

What amazed me the most about this book was learning that when Heyerdahl’s team arrived on Easter Island, all of the famed statues had been toppled face down in the dirt. This happened during a civil war on the island a couple centuries earlier. Heyerdahl, with the help of Indigenous workers, used traditional non-mechanical techniques to raise one of the statues upright. This was the first of such modern re-raisings. When you see photographs of a dozen monolithic heads lined up along the coast of Easter Island, all of those were raised after Heyerdahl, most of them not until the 1990s, when major restoration efforts were undertaken to encourage tourism. Heyerdahl was really the spark that set that flame of tourism alight, for better or for worse. On the one hand he brought attention to the cultural heritage of Rapa Nui; on the other hand his tactics trained the Natives to exploit that heritage for commerce.

While the giant stone heads, or moai, are quite fascinating, most of the book is not about that. It’s about Heyerdahl trying to convince the islanders to grant him access to their secret caves or hand over to him the artifacts that are contained therein. Heyerdahl’s methods of persuasion were not entirely ethical by today’s standards, nor is what ultimately happened to the artifacts (I think he just took them away on his boat). He starts out by bartering cloth and knives for small statues. He then moves up to chicanery in the form of exploiting the Natives’ superstitions to his advantage. Not only is this disturbing, it’s also rather boring. Long chapters go by in which Heyerdahl is just conning his way into these families’ caves, then not much is really said about the artifacts themselves and what they reveal about the island’s cultural history.

Heyerdahl’s theories on the Peruvian colonization of Polynesia have not stood up well to scientific scrutiny. Still, he’s usually very good at writing the adventure stories of his expeditions. Kon-Tiki is an excellent read, and I also enjoyed Fatu-Hiva, his account of roughing it in the Marquesas. Aku-Aku, however, is not as engrossing as those other books. It gets dull and repetitive, and Heyerdahl doesn’t talk much about the discoveries of the archaeologists who accompanied him. Other than collecting a lot of statuettes that aren’t thoroughly described to the reader, it’s unclear what exactly Heyerdahl and his team accomplished on Easter Island. Perhaps more is revealed in his more scientific publications, such as Archeology of Easter Island (2 volumes), published in 1965.

An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, edited by Charles H. Smith, James T. Costa, and David Collard

A survey of his career in and beyond biology

Alfred Russel Wallace is known as the other British naturalist who formulated the theory of evolution. While Darwin was taking his time writing On the Origin of Species, Wallace wrote a paper that also spelled out the process of natural selection. Through a gentleman’s agreement, Wallace stepped aside and let Darwin finish his book. That’s a highly abbreviated summary of what happened; the truth, of course, is more complicated. Nevertheless, Darwin’s name will forever be associated with evolution while many an average Joe these days has never even heard of Wallace. Wallace was nevertheless a very accomplished and respected biologist in his own right. He explored the Amazon basin and the Malay Archipelago, outlived Darwin by 31 years, and enjoyed a reputation as a “grand old man” of science. The book An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, published in 2019, is an edited collection of essays by nine academics who examine various aspects of Wallace’s career. They give much-deserved consideration to his numerous accomplishments in the biological sciences while also shedding light on his endeavors further afield.

This is not an introduction to Wallace, but it is a synthesis. The reader is expected to have a basic knowledge of who Wallace was and his relation to Darwin and the theory of evolution through natural selection, but the book does not get into arcane matters that require a PhD to understand. The essays are written with scholarly rigor, citations, and notes. The reading degree of difficulty is about at an undergraduate level of proficiency. Although all the contributors are clearly very knowledgeable about Wallace’s life and career, they explain matters sufficiently for those who are not. As a survey of Wallace’s career, the book is successful in educating the reader about his significant accomplishments and influence. The scope of the essays sometimes overlap, however, which results in reading some of the same information multiple times.

If another goal of this book, as I suspect, is to get the reader to admire and esteem Wallace, it is less successful on that score. My regard for Wallace as a scientist actually lessened as I worked my way through this book. For starters, the book opens with a discussion of Wallace’s belief in spiritualism. The word “spiritualism,” in the late 19th century, meant a belief in ghosts, the “spirit world,” and communication with the dead. In other words, Wallace was attending séances and being fooled by spirit-conjuring mediums. Although Wallace was one of the chief formulators of evolutionary science, he also believed in intelligent design. When animals became humans, God intervened and somehow turned on their minds and souls. The book closes with a discussion of Wallace’s writings on extraterrestrial life. He thought humans on Earth must be the only intelligent life in the universe because God essentially created evolution for us: We are the purpose of the universe. It gets hard to take seriously a scientist who clings to such superstitious, supernatural, and teleological beliefs. The book also discusses disagreements between Wallace and Darwin over the details of natural selection, and in most cases, it seems Darwin was in the right. In the end, one doesn’t feel so bad that Darwin got most of the credit for evolution.

Wallace was also an outspoken public intellectual on socioeconomic matters. He advocated socialism and came up with a plan for land nationalization. If you’re reading this book because you’re interested in natural history, you won’t relish the chapter on British land law, tariffs, etc. The main positive verdict with which one comes away from this book is that Wallace was a pioneer in the field of biogeography: the study and mapping of the distribution ranges of species. In the days before genetics and continental drift, this was a key to determining where species arose, how they spread, and how they were related to other species. Although Alexander von Humboldt preceded him in the creation of this field, Wallace developed it to a higher level, carving out a specific domain of research in which he surpassed Darwin. There is no doubt that Wallace is an immensely important scientist in the pantheon of natural history, but the spiritualism and anthropocentric teleology are definitely a disappointment. If you’re only going to read one book on Wallace, this volume does provide a fine overview of his thought, for better or for worse.

Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson by Paul Lawrence Farber

A brief primer on the history of natural history

Paul Lawrence Farber (1944–2021) was a professor of the history of science at Oregon State University. His specific area of interest was biology and natural history. His book Finding Order in Nature was first published in 1994. It relates how, over the course of about 250 years, the science of natural history progressed from the earliest efforts at species classification to the development of unified theories of life and the discovery of universal laws of nature.

Farber begins in the mid-18th century with the work of Sweden’s Carl Linnaeus and France’s Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, both of whom brought the classification of species to a systematic level that formed the foundation of modern natural history as we know it today. Many of the subsequent chapters revolve around conflicts of opposing views in the biological sciences: religious vs. secular views, form-ists (e.g. Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire) vs. function-ists (e.g. Georges Cuvier), experimental physiologists vs. collector/taxonomists, morphology vs. genetics. Of course, there’s a chapter on Charles Darwin, as well as those who championed his theory of evolution (e.g. Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Henry Huxley) and those who opposed it (e.g. Louis Agassiz, Richard Owen). As the subtitle indicates, the book ends with the recent work of E. O. Wilson, who pretty much gets a chapter all to himself.

This book is in Johns Hopkins University Press’s series Introductory Studies in the History of Science. The volumes in this series are deliberately intended to be brief overviews of their particular domains of science. Judging by Farber’s book alone, the only one I’ve read, these books are indeed introductory and written for students or other nonscientists. Finding Order in Nature runs about 200 pages. There are only about two or three footnotes per chapter and a bibliographic essay at the end. To me, this book reads as if it were meant to be a textbook for undergraduate students. The reading level is accessible enough, however, that it could even be used as a text for a high school course, if a course on such a subject existed.

I myself am not a scientist, but I read quite a few history books and biographies of naturalists. I like to live vicariously through their travels, researches, and discoveries. I was hoping that by reading this book I might discover some naturalists I’d never heard of and perhaps a few books I might want to pursue reading. The contents of Finding Order in Nature, however, were already largely familiar to me. In each of the book’s nine chapters, Farber covers two or three major players in natural history, and for the most part they are very well-known individuals. The most I got out of this was a few interesting biographical details on some of the scientists featured. I found a few titles of interest in the bibliographic essay, but the list of books is almost entirely comprised of secondary texts from the past fifty years rather than accounts written by the naturalists themselves.

That’s not to say that the book was a disappointment. I kind of knew what I was getting into when I bought it (as a Kindle Daily Deal). Farber accomplishes exactly what he set out to do. If I had read this book in my college days, it would have sparked my interest in natural history and given me a basic foundation for building further knowledge. At my present state of life and education, it was a brief and satisfying recap of a subject that I enjoy.

The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life by Nathalie A. Cabrol

Discouraging recap of our quest for certainty

Nathalie A. Cabrol, a French-American astrobiologist, is the director of the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute (SETI = Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She is very much qualified, therefore, to write about the latest research on extraterrestrial life. Her book The Secret Life of the Universe was published in 2023. These days, it’s hard to keep track of all the piecemeal press releases about exoplanets, unmanned space probes, Mars rovers, and such. I hoped to find in Cabrol’s book a comprehensive and intelligent recap of what we know about the possibilities of life within and without our solar system. She does a fine job of summarizing the present state of knowledge in this area. This book is generally organized from the Earth outwards, from Venus and Mars to other bodies in our solar system, and then on to the recently discovered exoplanets beyond.

Although we’re talking about other planets and stars here, astrobiology relies much on geology and meteorology—the workings of water, ice, gases, volcanism, and plate tectonics, for example. Since the life forms are unknown, Cabrol’s work, at least as revealed in this book, is more about studying environments that might be conducive to life rather than speculating about the life itself. She has deliberately written this book to be accessible to a wide audience whenever possible. In general, the text is less challenging than articles in Scientific American or National Geographic; it’s more on the level of USA Today. There are passages, however, where complex chemistry can’t be dumbed-down enough, and the lay reader may find it tough going.

In addition to filling Sagan’s role at SETI, Cabrol also tries to fill his shoes as an inspirational science communicator, but she is less successful at that. This book is educational, but it doesn’t generate a lot of excitement or a great deal of hope. As someone who cares about science and wants to learn more about the universe, I am hopeful that in my lifetime we will discover extraterrestrial life—by that I mean evidence of microbial life elsewhere in our solar system. After reading Cabrol’s book, however, I doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon. She points out lots of possibilities for life in our solar system, but also gives plenty of examples of why confirmation is impossible. We’ve had landers on Mars for 50 years, and we still don’t have a definitive yes/no answer on life there. For almost every other body in the solar system, Cabrol says again and again that there may be life miles beneath the surface. Given how many years and dollars it takes to develop exploratory space missions, it’s unlikely we’ll be digging that deep in the near future.

Exoplanets, and their diversity of environments, offer more hope of finding life of some kind, at whatever stage of development, but we’re nowhere close to sending a probe over light years of distance. Our only hope of discovering interstellar life is if it discovers us first. Cabrol briefly discusses UFOs, or UAPs, but that’s really outside the scope of this book, and she’s a skeptical in that department. More coverage is given to the SETI program, which is actually a number of different programs under the SETI umbrella. Not much luck there yet, either. Cabrol then goes from disappointing to depressing by closing the book with an environmentalist tirade that reminds us that we’re on the verge of rendering ourselves extinct anyway.

Scientists who take on the role of educating the public—Sagan, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and so on—generally try to inspire a sense of awe and wonder in the reader, hoping to spark their interest in the workings of the universe. Cabrol tries to do the same here, but this reader was just left feeling hopeless and kind of bored.

The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates

An exemplary narrative for armchair explorers

Henry Walter Bates (1825–1892) was an English naturalist. His area of expertise was entomology, the science of insects, but in the 19th century scientists were allowed to be generalists, so he made discoveries in other areas of biology as well. In 1842, Bates embarked on an expedition to explore the Amazon rainforest and gather specimens of the animals and plants that live there. Upon completing an expedition, 19th century naturalist-explorers would compile volumes of scientific texts describing the species they brought back with them. In addition, many would publish a narrative account of their travels intended for a general audience of non-scientists. In Bates’s case, the popular memoir he wrote of his South American journey is The Naturalist on the River Amazons, published in 1863.

This Amazon expedition started out as a joint undertaking with fellow British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who is now better-known than Bates for having formulated the theory of evolution about the same time as Charles Darwin. Once in Brazil, Wallace and Bates seem to have often split up and conducted their own research, and Wallace returned to England several years before Bates. It’s hard to tell how much time the two spent together. Bates only mentions “Mr. Wallace” a few times in this memoir. That’s not unusual for scientific memoirs of this period, however. There seems to have been a gentleman’s agreement that each explorer would talk about himself and leave his traveling companions to write their own books. Wallace published his account, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, in 1889.

Bates’s mode of operation was to travel up the Amazon to a certain city, acquire a house on the outskirts of town, and live there for a few years. From these home bases, he would make hiking or boat trips deeper into the wilderness to explore and gather specimens. In this memoir, Bates’s explorations center around three main locations: Pará, near the Amazon delta (today there is a state named Pará, but the city is named Belém); Santarém, several hundred miles further up the river; and Ega (now called Tefé), a small village on the upper Amazon near the Peruvian border. The Amazon region was already somewhat “civilized” by this time. Bates interacted mostly with Whites (Portuguese) and Mamelucos (people of mixed Portuguese and Indigenous heritage, the Brazilian equivalent of Mexico’s Mestizos), but he did encounter some Native tribes living a relatively untouched existence, as well as Blacks of African descent, both slaves and free. Despite the extent of Portuguese colonization, very few European scientists had explored the Amazon by this time, so new, undescribed species were ripe for the picking. In the book’s introduction, Darwin states that Bates collected specimens of 14,712 species, about 14,000 of them being insects, and about 8000 of those species (not just insects) being previously “unknown to science.”

The problem with a lot of exploration narratives of this era is that despite attempts at accessibility for a popular audience, they end up being too academically scientific. Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), though still widely read and highly regarded, is a difficult read for the non-scientist, as is Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America (1814). Bates, however, really strikes the perfect balance between travel memoir and scientific text. He really armchair travelers a vivid impression of what the Amazon region was like in these frontier days, but if you’re interested in biology, there’s also plenty of good stuff in here about the bugs, birds, monkeys, reptiles, and plants of Brazil. You also learn a great deal about the people of Brazil—communities of all different races and levels of economic and cultural development. While Bates was certainly not the anti-colonial liberal that Alexander von Humboldt was, he does not display a great deal of expected Victorian-era racism in this memoir. He does have a tendency, however, to judge people by their level of “civilization” and view those living further in the bush as dumb hicks, regardless of race. All in all, the strengths of Bates’s writing add up to an exemplary exploration narrative. For those who envy the lives of these pioneering naturalists—traveling to exotic lands, studying the natural environment, and discovering “new” species—Bates’s book is a dream come to life.

Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior by John Kricher

Basic overview with pretty pictures

Roger Tory Peterson (1908–1996) was an American artist and naturalist who was probably the most important figure in the development of birding as a hobby, pastime, and/or obsession. His line of Peterson Field Guides has grown beyond ornithology to over 50 volumes examining diverse aspects of nature and ecology (not all authored by Peterson). In 2015, the Peterson Institute started adding a series of Peterson Reference Guides to their line of books. The Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, written by John Kricher, was published in 2020.

I expected these Reference Guides to be for advanced birders who want to delve deeper than what’s found in the typical field guide, perhaps something along the lines of Kenn Kaufman’s Advanced Birding, also in the Peterson line. I found the Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, however, to be surprisingly basic. Most of the information imparted in this volume can likely be found in the introductory chapters of a good field guide—the opening pages that most people ignore because they just look at the bird pictures. The way Kricher delivers the information is also not ideal. The book is intentionally written for a beginning-birder, non-scientific audience, but that doesn’t stop the text from being at times confusing and often boring.

The first half of the book provides some valuable information on bird anatomy. Those lessons are not aided, however, by the absence of diagrams in this book. That is likely a conscious choice on the part of the publisher: If we put a lot of pretty photographs in the book, that will attract general readers, but if we include diagrams, that will scare general readers away. They’ll think the book is too intense for them, like a textbook. So everything is written out by Kricher in prose paragraphs, even when that’s not the most appropriate way to deliver the information. The chapter on different stages of molting, for instance, is quite difficult to comprehend, when a simple table or chart would have made it so much easier to understand and remember. But if we put a table in the book, we’ll scare away those general readers! If you just want a general book on birds and the cool things they do, full of pretty pictures, then I would recommend David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds.

The most difficult aspect of writing or reading a book like this is that the general subject of birds, even just North American birds, encompasses an incredibly broad and diverse range of species and behaviors. The result of this is that most of the text reads like “Some birds do this. Some birds do that.” The only solution for that is to consult a book with specific behavioral information on every individual species, such as Kaufman’s Lives of North American Birds. That book is truly a reference guide, while Kricher’s is really more of a primer. Kricher tries to solve the problem of diversity by providing many examples. The trouble with this approach is that the book consists almost entirely of examples with very few principles or conclusions drawn. I also don’t like the fact that Kricher talks about himself so much in this book: I once saw this, or I once banded such-and-such a bird. I’m from the Northeast, so we’re mostly going to talk about Northeastern birds. I don’t really care what your personal perspective is. I want to learn about the birds, and not just the birds with which you have some kind of personal connection.

I have seen the Peterson Reference Guide for Sparrows and for Woodpeckers, and they seem to be more of what I expected from these Reference Guides. Those books appear to be deeper and more thorough in nature, simply because they’re not expected to cover every bird species imaginable. (and the publisher allowed some diagrams!) In general, the Peterson Field Guides are great; I’ve derived much joy and learning from them. This particular Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, however, is not one of the Institute’s better-thought-out offerings.

Icarus; or, The Future of Science by Bertrand Russell

Pessimistic outlook on scientific progress

Bertrand Russell won the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature, even though he was not a literary writer. He was a philosopher and mathematician who broke through to a wider general audience as a public intellectual. His essay Icarus; or, The Future of Science was published in 1924 as a 72-page book. The London publisher Paul Kegan produced a series of 110 books called To-day and To-morrow, consisting of short volumes containing essays that speculate on the future. The first book in this series was Daedelus; or, Science and the Future by J. B. S. Haldane. Russell’s Icarus, published six months later, is a response to Daedelus. The two authors were not in total disagreement. Both expressed doubts that some recent scientific advances were actually beneficial to mankind, but overall Haldane was the more optimistic of the two. In general, Haldane thought scientific advances would elevate the happiness of the common man, while Russell predicts that only the powerful will reap the benefits of progress.

Russell opens Icarus by stating he’s not going to talk much about the biological sciences. That’s not his department, and Haldane already covered that topic sufficiently in Daedelus. Strangely, however, Russell then goes on to talk mostly about biological sciences: genetics, eugenics, birth control, and anthropology. The longest chapter discusses changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Russell really doesn’t discuss technology much at all, but rather focuses on how our modern industrial and commercial society has spawned a revolution in organization, both in terms of efficiency and ubiquity. The result is that people now have less control over their lives than they did in, say, the 17th century, since much of our existence is regimented by organizational bureaucracy and government oversight, from our lives at work to the media we consume to the education of our children. Russell goes on to argue that science may very well be the downfall of liberalism and democracy.

Science would increase mankind’s happiness and health, Russell argues, if man were a rational being, rather than an emotional and greedy animal. Rapid scientific progress upsets the comfort zone between man’s desires and living conditions. In addition to the mythical metaphor of Icarus, Russell offers the analogy of how wolves become accustomed to periods of starvation; as a result their evolutionary descendants, domestic dogs, overeat every chance they get. It would be interesting to hear Russell’s take on the current (human) obesity epidemic, something he does not predict here.

I suspect that Icarus may have been delivered as a lecture before it was published in book form. That’s how it reads, anyway. The two books, Daedelus and Icarus, comprise a sort of debate in print, a point/counterpoint. Much of what Russell predicts for the future has already come to pass—declining birth rates, global economy, media empires, the arms race, and a general dumbing down of humanity. He presents some really interesting ideas here, but the obvious fault of the book is its brevity. It would have been a more productive work if Russell had had more room to develop his arguments, but the format of the To-day and To-morrow series confined it to a brief discussion. There aren’t enough pages for him to really convince you of anything. This is a thought-provoking work, but more thoughts are provoked than satisfied. Perhaps Russell delves deeper into these topics in other books, and I have yet to discover them.

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Big universe, big thoughts

The 1980 PBS TV series Cosmos was a landmark in the history of television. The companion book to that series, also published in 1980, was the bestselling science book of all time (until Stephen Hawking beat it a few years later). The Cosmos book has 13 chapters that parallel the 13 episodes of the TV program. Alexander von Humboldt published the original Cosmos book back in 1845 to 1862, and Sagan does mention Humboldt in a footnote. The intent by both authors was to summarize and encapsulate in one volume the state of scientific knowledge on the heavens and the earth. Though Humboldt’s Cosmos was popular in its day, his was a pretty dry scientific text compared to Sagan’s more accessible and inspirational book. The way Sagan combines science writing with philosophy, skepticism, and freethought reminds me of another book from the end of the 19th century: Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe.

As one would expect from an astronomer and planetary scientist, Sagan spends much of Cosmos discussing the planets and other bodies in our solar system, as well as galaxies, the universe as a whole, space travel, the Big Bang, and the search for extraterrestrial life. In addition, however, he discusses particle physics, the origin of life, DNA, evolution, the history of science and astronomy (particularly in ancient Greece), and the human brain. The final chapter of Cosmos is about nuclear war. Although still a threat, Armageddon is not on people’s minds as much as it was in the ‘80s, and disarmament now seems further from reality.

Like any science book of years gone by, the obvious drawback to Cosmos is that it’s outdated. Sagan doesn’t really say anything wrong in this book, but what’s omitted is notable. There’s no mention of quantum physics or dark matter, for example. Sagan wrote Cosmos after Voyager 2 had performed its flyby of Jupiter but before it had reached Saturn. There was no Hubble Space Telescope. The existence of exoplanets was still suspected, not confirmed. The nearly fifty intervening years since publication, however, didn’t really bother me. I consider myself pretty well-versed in astronomical matters for a general reader, but I still learned many interesting scientific facts from Sagan’s Cosmos. Sagan is great at putting things into perspective, both humanity’s insignificance in the universe and the immensity of space and time. (He’s much more eloquent than the “billions and billions” catch phrase for which he’s known.)

I’d read much of this information before, but never as succinctly nor as elegantly put as Sagan presents things here. The other famous science book of this era was, of course, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Though also aimed at the general reader, Hawking’s book is not easy to understand and his explanations aren’t quite user-friendly for the layman. Sagan, on the other hand, is great at explaining complex scientific phenomena in simple terms that anyone with a high school education can understand, without dumbing down the scientific content or the philosophical implications of the matters discussed.

Sagan stopped short of declaring himself an atheist, but for readers of a freethinking persuasion, he is one of the best areligious writers out there, if not the best. He is a superb rationalist preacher, without the pretensions or cynicism of Richard Dawkins and other “neo-atheists.” Since Sagan’s death, others have tried to assume his role as leading spokesman for science—most recently Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye—but no one has quite matched his passion, eloquence, and trustworthiness as a public intellectual. Cosmos, although published in the middle of his career, is Sagan’s magnum opus, the distillation of his entire career. His other books may focus in more detail on some of the topics presented here, but no book better encapsulates his thought in its totality as this one. In the 1980s, this book was a must-read, and today it’s still an important and rewarding work for anyone who cares about science.

Cosmos, Volume I by Alexander von Humboldt

All of the things that go to make Heaven and Earth

If you’re old enough, you may remember the classic 1980s television series Cosmos, created and hosted by the astronomer Carl Sagan. Or, you might recall the 2014 series Cosmos, a tribute to Sagan’s work, hosted by Neil de Grasse Tyson. Both, however, stole the idea of Cosmos from Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Just as Sagan and Tyson were likely the most famous scientists in America at the time their TV shows were broadcast, Humboldt was probably the most famous scientist in the world when he published his late-career magnum opus Cosmos. This landmark work of science literature was published in five volumes, the first of which, the subject of this review, came out in 1849. Humboldt’s Cosmos is an attempt to synthesize all knowledge of the natural sciences up to the mid-nineteenth century. It reads as if Humboldt wrote it for his scientific peers, but Cosmos also enjoyed an immense popular readership in its day.

Humboldt unfurls his scientific overview in a systematic fashion, beginning with the large and moving to the small. He starts by discussing “nebulae” that we now know to be other galaxies. He then examines the various components of our solar system before moving on to the Earth’s seismic and volcanic activities and its rocks and minerals. Then it’s on to oceanography and climatology before finally arriving at life in the form of plants, animals, and humans. Although Humboldt proceeds with systematic rigor, he was also notoriously prone to digressions on whatever topics interested him. The book gets off to a slow start with about a hundred pages of introductory material in which he outlines how scientists should write about nature, how he’s going to write about it, and what exactly he’s going to tell you, before he ever gets around to telling it. As an example of Humboldt’s wandering mind, even in this “general” introduction, there is a three-page footnote about the elevation of the snow line on various mountains of the world. When he finally gets to his “General Review of Natural Phenomena,” delivers it in typical nineteenth-century fashion: all in one long chapter with no breaks or subheads. Humboldt gives special extended attention to some of his “pet” interests, such as the zodiacal light (sunlight reflecting off cosmic dust). The English edition that I read from 1868 (translation by E. C. Otté) has only one appendix; it’s about prehistoric birds in New Zealand.

It’s really interesting to learn about the state of science in 1849, and how scientists and explorers of that era went about obtaining knowledge of our universe. This was before the discovery of continental drift or Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, but such revelations are certainly foreshadowed in this work. I’ve always admired Humboldt as an explorer and a naturalist, but when reading Cosmos one can’t help but admire him as a researcher. He seems to have read everything that had been published in four or five languages, no small feat when you consider how difficult it must have been just to get one’s hands on a specific book in those days, or how much time, effort, and patience was required for correspondence with one’s scientific colleagues.

Though he had an encyclopedic mind and a voracious appetite for specifics, as evidenced by some of the trivial rabbit holes he ventures down in this book, Humboldt was science’s master generalist. He was well-versed in a multitude of scientific disciplines, and his writings emphasize how all natural phenomena are intricately connected into a cohesive and interdependent whole. In this regard, Humboldt was the founder of ecology as we know it. In the introduction to Cosmos, he explains that he wants to write a work that assembles precise empirical data but never loses sight of the essential beauty and wonder of nature, the emotional effect so important to the Romantic movement. As far as imparting the beauty and sublimity of nature is concerned, Humboldt was more successful with his earlier work Views of Nature. Cosmos, on the other hand, reads more like a relentless torrent of data, but it’s a fascinating torrent to mentally bathe oneself in. Reading Cosmos is like living vicariously through a golden age of natural science, as if you were one of Humboldt’s associates. It’s a difficult read, not for everybody, but if you enjoy science history, a trek through Volume I of Cosmos is an inspiring and enlightening experience.  

All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures by Roger Tory Peterson

A miscellany of magazine columns

Roger Tory Peterson (1908–1996) is not only the biggest name in birding but also a notable figure in book history. Others had published bird guides before Peterson, but he more or less created the modern genre of the popular illustrated field guide as we know it today. His Peterson Field Guides have since expanded into a broad range of natural history beyond just birds, and countless other authors, artists, and publishers have built and expanded upon his original template. All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures was published in 2006. From the title, packaging, and table of contents, I had hoped I was getting a Peterson autobiography, or at least a birding memoir along the lines of Kenn Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway or Noah Strycker’s Birding Without Borders. That was not the case, however. “All Things Reconsidered” is the title of a column that Peterson wrote for Bird Watcher’s Digest magazine. This book is a collection of those articles. The 42 selections included here are arranged in chronological order by date of original publication, from 1984 to 1996.

While not an autobiography, most of the articles reproduced in this grab bag are to some extent autobiographical. The majority do in fact focus on birding adventures, with Peterson describing trips he took to find birds in various locations, from Connecticut to Botswana to Antarctica. These stories reach back as far as the 1920s. Peterson is famous as a painter of birds, but he was also a bird photographer, and many of these articles are as much about photography as about birding. There’s very little in here about art, except for a couple of good entries at the end of the book. In addition to bird finding and bird identification, these articles cover a number of other bird-related topics, including wildlife conservation, ecotourism, extinct species, and birding history. Peterson devotes a couple columns to the life of John James Audubon, and spends several entries eulogizing or paying tribute to his contemporary birding colleagues and friends.

One learns a bit about birds from this book but learns even more about birding tourism—sites to visit, how to get there, what species you’ll find, etc. Because Peterson is the rock star of birding, his ornithological outings are far from typical. Peterson was successful enough in his career to afford a globe-hopping lifestyle. He gets “backstage” access to wildlife refuges and national parks, with permission to venture into areas in which the general public is not allowed. Wherever he goes birding, he is guided by the manager or director of the refuge he’s visiting or the leading ornithologists in the area, who give him the inside tips on where to find the rare, endemic species. Peterson also gets ferried around to remote locations by a host of friends with yachts, planes, safari caravans, and research vessels. The average birder’s experience at these sites is unlikely to resemble Peterson’s, but it is entertaining to live vicariously through his experiences. I really admire that Peterson, having realized at a young age that he loved birds, decided to build a life around them, successfully forged a unique career path, and despite not really being an academic ornithologist, he nonetheless made a lasting impact on ornithology.

All Things Reconsidered is what it is: a collection of short, miscellaneous magazine articles, and that’s what it reads like. Peterson is a good writer who delivers clear prose and keeps things interesting. If you’re a birder, you certainly won’t be bored reading his bird-related memories. On the other hand, this book isn’t really about anything in particular, so you’re not going to learn a whole lot about anything in particular, including Peterson’s life and career. A book called Wild America (1955) would be Peterson’s equivalent to Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway, and I don’t believe he published an autobiography. He did leave us a lot of great books on birds, however, and for that we owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New by Peter Watson

Long-lost cousins with vastly different upbringings

When Europeans first discovered the Americas, it was the meeting of two vastly different cultures, two populations that were entirely alien to one another. In his 2012 book, The Great Divide, British intellectual historian Peter Watson investigates how and why the peoples of the Old and New Worlds developed so differently. Watson makes the case that differing environmental conditions in the two hemispheres—climate, topography, flora and fauna—forged two diverging trajectories of civilization and culture. In The Great Divide, he has compiled compelling evidence to that effect into a sweeping overview of human history. Some factors that he considers are the role that natural disasters played in the creation of gods and religions, how different flora and fauna affected the rates at which agriculture and cities developed, how the use of psychotropic plants influenced cultural ideologies, and why was human sacrifice such a widespread practice in the Americas?

As I’ve come to learn from previously reading his books Ideas and The Modern Mind, Watson is a master generalist who can pull together concepts and data from a wide variety of fields in the sciences, humanities, and the arts and unify them into a remarkably cohesive whole. The Great Divide, however, is pretty much all about archeology, anthropology, and paleontology. I thought this book would have something to say about the cultures of the Old World and the New after the first transatlantic contact, but with the exception of some brief coverage of the Spanish Conquest, it is entirely concerned with events prior to 1492. Watson’s investigation begins with the dawn of humans and spends a lot of time in the Ice Age. Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius don’t show up until chapter 18, and the Spaniards don’t reach America until the 23rd and final chapter. The Great Divide is basically a comprehensive summary of world archaeology, as much as we knew in 2012. I enjoy reading about archaeology, but because I read quite a bit on that subject, a lot of this was review for me. Nevertheless, as is always the case with Watson’s books, he enriches the general narrative with plenty of interesting facts and connections that will be new and intriguing to most general readers.

If the purpose of this book is to compare and contrast the pre-1492 trajectories of the Old and New Worlds, it is not entirely successful. Watson presents a few chapters on the history of the Old World, followed by a couple chapters on the history of the New World, and back and forth, and back and forth. Only in the conclusion of the book, when recapping all the evidence presented, does Watson really take the time to make side-by-side comparisons between the two domains and draw generalizations and theories from their differences. The two hemispheres, not surprisingly, do not get equal time and consideration. It seems like the book is about two-thirds Old World and one-third New World, simply because there’s so much more pre-16th-century information available on Eurasia than there is on the Americas.

The Great Divide is an excellent synthesis of human history that draws interesting parallels and deviations between the peoples of the Eastern and Western hemispheres. This book will not, however, captivate the general reader to the same extent as Charles Mann’s excellent 1491 or perhaps Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (which I haven’t read, but it was a popular bestseller). Although Watson does generate similar wow-factor by delivering insightful revelations to curious readers, The Great Divide has more of a textbook execution to it, rather than the more investigative science journalism feel of Mann’s work. Notwithstanding, if you are at all interested in the ancient history of world cultures, this book’s breadth and depth make it a must-read.

The ebook claims that an Appendix 2 is available online at the Harper Collins website, but it’s not there, and that’s really annoying.